Questioning the Meaning of Literacy

Readers of Education Week are well informed of the proliferation of
types of literacy. They have found, along with stories on adult
literacy, several page 1 articles within the past year on other kinds:
computer, scientific, religious, economic, and, finally, cultural
literacy. Such proliferation makes one question the very meaning of the
word.

Current practice seems to be to append the term to any field of
knowledge a speaker feels is vital, suggesting that literacy is being
defined as mastery of all intrinsically "necessary'' information. But
examining the historical use of the term reveals an alternative
definition: mastery of the best current skills of inquiry. Behind these
alternative definitions lie conflicting philosophies of education.

In an 1883 issue of The New England Journal of Education, the term
"literacy'' was used to describe merely the ability to read and write,
a meaning derived from the word's etymological significance as the
knowledge of letters. Some people then viewed this narrow knowledge
base as all that was inherently necessary for a person to be an
efficient machine operator--or to be cultured. Education was a matter
of learning facts.

But others considered knowledge of letters in its generic character
an efficient means of inquiry. In the 19th century, before the wide
development of scientific and technological research, reading was the
main avenue for learning things beyond one's personal experience. Once
one could read, one could acquire any information from the written
human record--the purpose being to question and enlarge upon that which
was already known.

One 19th-century educator who treated literacy as mastery of inquiry
rather than of information was Horace Mann. He saw reading, along with
observation of nature, as a tool for thinking that would enable the
literate to escape the bonds of ignorance and convention:

The wealth and prosperity of Massachusetts are not owing to natural
position or resources ... Their origin is good thinking, carried out
into good action; and intelligent reading in a child will result in
good thinking in the man or woman.

But in the selection of books for school libraries ... never ask for
the introduction of any book because it favors the distinctive views of
... sect or party.

... Strengthen the intellect of children, by exercise upon the
objects and laws of Nature; ... and, as far as public measures,
applicable to all, can reach, you have the highest human assurance
that, when they grow up, they will adopt your favorite opinions, if
they are right, or discover the true reasons for discarding them, if
they are wrong.

In the 20th century, the skills used in inquiry have evolved.
Learning the human record still depends in large part upon reading, but
participating in the advance of human understanding is now recognized
to depend on mastery of skills in scientific and technological research
and development. Such mastery does not call for filling students with
the results of past scientific and technological inquiries. Rather, it
requires for modern literacy that students master modern tools of
inquiry. They should learn the languages of number as well as of
letters; they should master electronic and other instruments of
observation, experimentation, and testing.

Some have responded to the new situation by calling for
"scientific'' and "economic'' literacy. Using the term to identify
information from distinct fields, they argue that youths should be
taught the answers that adults have arrived at in such specialized
fields--a mistake Wendell Johnson urged us to avoid two generations ago,
when he wrote People in Quandaries:

In the main, knowledge has been given the student, but not a method
for adding to it or revising it--except the method of authority, of
going to the book, of asking the Old Man. The chief aim of education
has been to make the child another Old Man, to pour the new wines of
possibility into the old bottles of tradition.

The April 1 edition of this newspaper reports just such a mistake in
the move for economic literacy. Twenty-seven states require some form
of economics instruction, teaching basic concepts that are supposed to
make students better decisionmakers and citizens. But the basic
concepts taught represent a particular version of economic
analysis--that which finds markets "naturally'' organizing and
controlling economic activity. Students are told to take wants and
scarce resources as basic data, rather than as socially determined
patterns of behavior and belief. They are taught that supply and demand
are facts of life, not assumption-laden interpretations of a narrow
range of phenomena of exchange.

After teaching economics for 20 years, there is nothing I want less
than students "literate'' in such thought patterns. The gravest
shortcoming of my students is not a lack of economic "information,''
but rigid thinking that makes them unable to observe phenomena directly
or to evaluate alternative patterns of analysis. Even many who have not
studied economics before coming to college unconsciously accept the
validity of supply-and-demand concepts. Such a preconception makes them
incapable of understanding, much less evaluating, unconventional
analyses such as those of Thorstein Veblen or John Maynard Keynes or
Buckminster Fuller.

My students are like those Newtonian physicists who had to die
before Einstein's ideas could be widely taught, whose "literacy'' in
the conventional wisdom prevented them from mastering or appreciating
advances of human understanding. Einstein himself well recognized the
problem; he would not have called mastery of information
"literacy'':

Concepts that have proved useful for ordinary things easily assume
so great an authority over us that we forget their terrestrial origin
and accept them as unalterable facts. They then become labeled as
"conceptual necessities,'' a priori situations. The road of scientific
progress is frequently blocked for long periods by such errors. It is
therefore not just an idle game to exercise our ability to analyze
familiar concepts, and to demonstrate the conditions on which their
justification and usefulness depend. In this way, they are deprived of
their excessive authority.

When I read calls for facts-oriented curricula and for competence in
placing information in pre-existing schemata, I recognize a "literacy''
that is antithetical to inquiry. Students would not be encouraged to
question, but would instead be constantly tested on their acceptance of
the concepts and substantive answers now accepted by the experts.
Teachers who would thus define literacy as information mastery condemn
themselves to making incoherent and interminable lists of "What
Literate Americans Know,'' turning schools into knowledge bowls, and
giving students answers to questions they have not asked.

If, however, educators wish to follow the historical precedent of
treating literacy as mastery of the best extant tools of inquiry, we
can turn schools into places of inquiry and engage in genuine
discussions with our students. We can demonstrate that no information
is intrinsically valuable, but gains significance only as it is
relevant to particular inquiries. We will then participate in the
continuum of inquiry so well described by John Dewey half a century
ago, and produce a whole nation (if we are incapable of thinking of
mankind) capable of operating at the frontiers of knowledge.

Baldwin Ranson is an economics professor at Western State College of
Colorado in Gunnison, Colo.

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